domain:nature.com
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '21
6m ago
I'm sorry, but here at The Motte you need to write like everyone is reading. Your bigoted comment would have made me feel unwelcome and emotionally unsafe had my masters not seen fit to also make me a Zensunni master at peace with life. We need you to Do Better.
4doorsmorewhores
12m ago
I'm also confused by this. She has an onlyfans which she advertises on her twitter and instagram, which are both just full of normie talking-point debates
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has issued a full pardon for U.S. Army Sergeant Daniel Perry.
Perry was convicted last year of murder in the shooting death of Garrett Foster, a USAF veteran and BLM protestor. Foster had attended a downtown Austin protest armed with an AK-pattern rifle, and joined his fellow protestors in illegally barricading the street. Perry's car was halted by the barricade, Foster approached the driver's side door, rifle in hand, and Perry shot him four times from a range of roughly 18 inches, fatally wounding him. Police reported that Foster's rifle was recovered with an empty chamber and the safety on.
Perry claimed that the shooting was self defense, that the protestors swarmed his vehicle, and that Foster advanced on him and pointed his rifle at him, presenting an immediate lethal threat. Foster's fellow protestors claimed that Foster did not point his rifle at Perry, and that the shooting was unprovoked. They pointed to posts made by Perry on social media, expressing hostility toward BLM protestors and discussing armed self-defense against them, and claimed that Perry intentionally crashed into the crowd of protestors to provoke an incident. For his part, Foster was interviewed just prior to the shooting, and likewise expressed hostility toward those opposed to the BLM cause and at least some desire to "use" his rifle.
This incident was one of a number of claimed self-defense shootings that occurred during the BLM riots, and we've previously discussed the clear tribal split in how that worked out for them, despite, in most cases, clear-cut video evidence for or against their claims. The case against Perry was actually better than most of the Reds, in that the video available was far less clear about what actually happened. As with the other Red cases, the state came down like a ton of bricks. An Austin jury found Perry guilty of murder, and sentenced him to 25 years in prison.
Unlike the other cases, this one happened in Texas, and before the trial had completed, support for Perry was strong and growing. That support resulted in Governor Abbott referring Perry's case to the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles. A year later, the board returned a unanimous recommendation for a pardon to be granted. Abbott has now granted that pardon, and Perry is a free man, with his full civil rights restored to him. He has spent a little more than a year in prison, and his military career has been destroyed, but he is no longer in jail and no longer a felon.
So, now what?
It seems to me that there's a lot of fruitful avenues of discussion here. Was the shooting legitimate self-defense? To what degree did the protestors' tactics of illegally barricading streets, widespread throughout the Floyd riots and a recurring prelude to tragedy, bear responsibility for the outcome? How should we interpret Perry's comments prior to the shooting, or Foster's for that matter?
Two points seem most salient to me.
First, this case is a good demonstration of how the Culture War only rewards escalation, and degrades all pretensions to impartiality. I do not believe that anyone, on either side, is actually looking at this case in isolation and attempting to apply the rules as written as straightforwardly as possible. For both Blues and Reds, narrative trumps any set of particular facts. No significant portion of Blues are ever going to accept Reds killing Blues as legitimate, no matter what the facts are. Whatever portion of Reds might be willing to agree that Reds killing Blues in self-defense might have been illegitimate appears to be trending downward.
Second, this does not seem to be an example of the process working as intended. If the goal of our justice system is to settle such issues, it seems to have failed here. Red Tribe did not accept Perry's conviction as legitimate, and Blue Tribe has not accepted his pardon as legitimate. From a rules-based perspective, the pardon and the conviction are equally valid, but the results in terms of perceived legitimacy are indistinguishable from "who, whom". As I've pointed out many times before, rules-based systems require trust that the rules are fair to operate. That trust is evidently gone.
This is what we refer to in the business as a "bad sign".
100ProofTollBooth
15m ago
you obviously can't stop some man eerily similar to you from acting in hardcore pornography
This seems .... oddly specific. And an epic humble brag if so.
100ProofTollBooth
22m ago
The r/K selection theory has pretty much confirmed what you're skeptical of.
Human women have a very long and difficult pregnancy and an extremely long child rearing period. They have a massive incentive to mate with a mate who is going to stick around.
Playing hard to get is a filtering mechanism for a man's ability to stick with an effort despite initial failure or hardship. It's as simple as that. Phrased differently, "if I make it easy for him to come (that's an unintentional double entendre! hahaha, nice), it will also be easy for him to go...Therefore, I have to make it a little hard up front to test out if he's going to see it through"
We can't and don't want to hack our own biology. The "hack" is the social norms and culture that we build to compensate for our biology. In sexual relations, ambiguity is a real problem. Playing coy is intentional ambiguity. We used to deal with it by creating more obvious courtship milestones - she's playing coy, so you ask her to "go steady" or go to the dance or whatever, that's an obvious next step with some built in commitment by both parties. Nowadays, however, literally sleeping with someone is ambiguous. "I know we fucked, but I'm not sure I like like you" is in the head of hundreds of thousands of men and women right now.
This is all a way of saying that we shouldn't ask women not to play coy and start announcing their intentions in a legalistic format upfront (that's autist level 4000 thinking). We should, however, provide the social pressure to hold them accountable for crossing various milestones as well as general honesty with partners. Likewise, on the male side of things, we should be coaching young men on what a good courtship looks like, penalize them for cad-ambiguity behavior, and harshly socially penalize them for abandonment, absentee fatherism, etc. Fortunately, male coercive sexual behavior is still universally recognized as abhorrent - at least in the west
pigeonburger
26m ago
Yeah, I saw that news too; someone I had never about before pinging on my radar twice within less than a month is a sure sign to me something is up. Someone is trying to market that person to me. It could be her marketing herself succesfully as it got the attention of two sites where I get linked to news, or a third party powerful enough to have it pushed past the filters to make sure people like me heard about her.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
26m ago
Are non-monogamous societies somehow less downstream of biology than monogamous societies? Observationally dating norms have been very different historically than they are today and can be quite different in different geographical locations even today. It thus seems hard, to me, to argue that some set of dating norms common in the anglosphere are some biological inevitability.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
31m ago
You can do that, but it's rare. Therefore, as in Scott's Be nice at least until you can coordinate meanness (which I only partly agree with), it doesn't really do much unless it's a norm. The curve of behavior as a function of consequence is highly nonlinear, and a rule which is enforced in 0.1% of cases might as well not exist, since people will just ignore it. A world in which each instance of hooking up under false pretenses carries a 0.1% chance of getting beat up or having to go to court leads to basically no change in behavior and just increases violence to no benefit. It's only if men seeking to take advantage of women expect to actually face consequences, and have either had it happen to themselves in the past or to people they know, that they will factor those consequences and rethink their behavior.
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
32m ago
While Nike was named after the Greek goddess of victory (and came out of a company called Blue Ribbon Sports, referring to victory in another way), Budweiser was not named after the concept of being a buddy, nor after a flower bud.
2rafa
35m ago
Not wanting to seem too easy is probably a feature of all monogamous societies. Whether you think civilization is downstream of biology is, I suppose, up to you.
sliders1234
42m ago
U-Visas, or Visas for illegals who suffered violent crime in the U.S. has recently come into the news as a gang in Chicago did fake robberies to help illegals get U-Visas. The program was originally designed to help sex trafficking victims. But had already expanded.
https://cwbchicago.com/2024/05/chicago-fake-robbery-visa-scam.html
If I had to guess this gang was probably not the originator of these schemes. And there are immigrant attorneys and NGO’s spreading the loophole.
https://www.injusticewatch.org/project/u-visa/2022/chicago-police-u-visa-denials/
Leftist piece detailing two Chicago cops who were known for denying U-Visa claims. One case in particular caught my eye of an illegals son being murdered in Chicago and then using it to apply the entire family for U-Visas. Basically if you let the gangbanging families into the country eventually junior gets killed and everyone is legal. A lot of the cases sound like antisocial illegal behavior making them eligible for getting U-Visas.
What started out as a nice way to help sex-trafficking victims then turned into a whole institution for getting immigrants legal. And then it turned into let’s just fake the crimes.
Of course this is a prime example of perverse incentives and the cobra effect. Once you start measuring something people find a way to get the incentive in a way that does not accomplish your goal.
It’s also an indicator for why America is becoming a low trust society. As a Republican I see no reason to ever compromise with the left. If you try to do something reasonable like U-Visas or Asylum or money for terrorist attack victims (turning into massive student loan relief) the left will abuse your reasonableness.
It’s also why the right with some help from Trump was wise to shutdown the immigration bill. That which is written on paper isn’t important. It will be abused. Controlling the executive, beauraucracy, and the process is where the power lies.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
43m ago
I am skeptical that the particular facts of women playing hard to get are downwind of biology.
ThenElection
44m ago
I got a wife by changing my strategy, and we make each other extremely happy, so the outcome was definitely net good for us. And I'm 90% confident that continuing on my previous path would have ended in actual suicide.
In the end, I'm not going to martyr myself, or advise anyone else to martyr himself, to satisfy an imagined set of rules the vast majority of women don't even themselves follow. Make it even 25%, and I'd reconsider.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
49m ago
Next thing you’ll tell me is that “Bud Light” is not, in fact, your bud.
FaibleEstimeDeSoi
50m ago
I think it's insane that US makes hiring lookalikes illegal. People writing about "owning their own likeness", but the existence of this law proves that it wasn't theirs to begin with. Scarlett Johansson was just one of the women who looks and sounds generally like her to become famous. In the alternative reality person who voiced gpt4o was famous and SJ was hired because she sounded similar enough.
I am not even remotely some kind of libertarian, but what is the actual harm to society this regulation prevents? People who look like other people always existed and if you obviously can't stop some man eerily similar to you from acting in hardcore pornography I don't see why SJ should be granted anything here.
WhiningCoil
1hr ago
Maybe with respect to my gripe about financial markets.
The dating market is downwind of biology. There is no changing that.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
1hr ago
On the one hand, I don't doubt it is individually sucky to break away from social norms like this. On the other hand, if we all decide to continue as if these are the rules then they remain the rules. Society does not spontaneously re-order due to nobody doing anything. It is a difficult collective action and coordination problem.
Supah_Schmendrick
1hr ago
Oh sure. I'm just less familiar with that than with the French stuff.
Pongalh
1hr ago
I pulled an Altman with Anna Khachiyan's voice, incidentally: https://x.com/DainFitzgerald/status/1791195409383292992
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
1hr ago
Or engaging in motivated reasoning, or misunderstanding how unique individual voices actually are, or probably a bunch of other possible explanations.
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
1hr ago
I get that you hate Sam Altman and believe he is a sociopath. I don't understand where that hatred or conclusion are coming from, but I also don't particularly care. What I don't like is that your "fuck that guy" attitude seems to be motivating accusations of wrongdoing on other flimsy and pretextual grounds. It diminishes us to engage in that.
gattsuru
1hr ago
I'll caveat that this is a little more complicated than the quick summary -- you can find some Catholics being very skeptical and treating the accusers as heretics into the height of the early modern witch trials, and there's a controversial claim of an English witch-execution as early as the 900s. It's not clear how much the earlier Church was free of witch-hunting among the laity because they didn't believe in it (or were told to not believe in it), and how much because the records weren't made to start with.
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
1hr ago
Yes. When has Sam Altman suggested that he'd St. Petersburg Paradox us into oblivion?
WhiningCoil
1hr ago
Maybe. If all you are trying to do is get as much sex as you can, fine. But this happens in other context too.
This happens after you've been getting to know a woman for a few weeks, and there is some ambiguity about whether this is going to be friends, or more. You feel like you click on every level, and one night you get your shot to take things to the next level. But you mistook her playing coy for earnestly saying no, and you failed your audition. Now she has the ick and you are permanently friendzoned.
Is it fair? No. But, and I don't have statistics here, if you decide to cut off every woman who does that from your potential partner pool, you've probably just axed 90+% of otherwise well adjusted women. Because in the experience of everyone I've ever spoken to, some degree of overcoming resistance to prove how attracted you are to a woman is expected by both sexes.
I spent my 20's raging at the banking system post 2008 bank bailouts, refusing to participate with my money in a corrupt and fraudulent investing markets... only for nothing to happen. In my 30's I decided I wasn't going to be the only chump not getting mine, and now I have a seven figure net worth. Likewise, I spent my 20's expecting women to be honest, straight forward, and exercise agency. I had zero success. Needless to say in my 30's I changed strategies.
Some systems just aren't worth raging against. The rules may not be fair, but unfortunately we don't get to change them.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/sessions-prohibits-settlement-agreements-that-donate-money-to-outside-groups/2017/06/06/c0b2e700-4b02-11e7-bc1b-fddbd8359dee_story.html
http://www.wsj.com/articles/look-whos-getting-that-bank-settlement-cash-1472421204
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-justice-departments-bank-settlement-slush-fund/2016/08/31/a3b4da7a-6eec-11e6-8365-b19e428a975e_story.html?tid=a_inl&utm_term=.747f8283a443
https://rtp.fedsoc.org/paper/improper-third-party-payments-in-u-s-government-litigation-settlements/
https://www.judicialwatch.org/doj-give-leftist-groups-cut-b-settlement/
Obama is a Chicago politician, and US politics is now Chicago politics. Trump ended the policy rather than using it to find the right, and now Biden has restarted it to keep leftists swimming in cash. As if they didn't get enough of it from the billions handed to them in 2021.
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